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Education reform in early childhood education in China has often adopted western theories and pedagogies in efforts to facilitate educational change. The theory of multiple intelligences (MI) is an example of one adopted. This paper reports on a study that examined factors that influence Chinese kindergarten teachers' use of MI theory in their pedagogy. The study was a qualitative case study with seven participants from two kindergartens. Multiple methods were used to understand the contexts of these teachers' work, their understandings and practices, and ways that they had become exposed to ideas about MI. A number of influences were apparent in shaping teacher understandings and practices. These influences at times motivated teachers to incorporate MI, but there were also instances where teachers were unsure and confused about MI and struggled to meld it with their existing beliefs and practices based on longstanding Chinese values and pedagogies. The paper argues that if the policy goal of any educational reform is to facilitate teacher change then the introduction of new educational theories or approaches should first be grounded in, and connected carefully with, teachers' practices and, second, take careful consideration of the context in which their teaching will be embedded.

Curriculum policy and enactment in early childhood education is a political phenomenon that plays out in particular cultural contexts. Comparative lenses to curriculum articulate locally constructed and implicit knowledge to external audiences. In doing so, global commonalities and tensions may become explicit. This paper interrogates curricular documents in Greece and New Zealand using selected questions from Joseph's (2011a) heuristic of 'curriculum as culture'. We do this through writing letters to each other that share our local knowledge and experiences and raise further questions. Although New Zealand and Greece are geographically and culturally two worlds apart, their curricular practices share certain discourses and have both been influenced by international trends. We argue that both countries' documents relate to first-order change where the policy document may not, in itself, update or change prior practices.

Evidence of outcomes of the early years is highly dependent on what is considered as an outcome, the curriculum and relationships children experience, and the research designs and methods used to ascertain the value of early childhood education. This article reports from an original study in New Zealand that used narrative inquiry to interview young adults about their interests as children, ways these interests were stimulated and responded to, and the trajectory and outcomes of the interest in their lives-to-date. The findings suggest that interests provided sources of motivation, achievement, enjoyment and satisfaction in their lives, sustained the participants during difficult times, and led to a range of outcomes. This article argues that the evidence base for early childhood education needs to incorporate a broader view of what counts as outcomes and considers children's interests thoughtfully as part of what matters. It also needs to include qualitative methodologies in studies seeking evidence of outcomes to enable the richness of human life experience and the social and cultural contexts of children's upbringings to be captured.

Many scholars are influenced by the theoretical contributions of Lev Vygotsky. Significant post-Vygotskian scholarly writing highlights sociocultural perspectives of understanding everyday, informal learning as an important phenomenon. Ideas of participatory learning, and knowledge building through participation and inquiry, are included in the work of Barbara Rogoff, Gordon Wells and Judith Lindfors. Synthesizing their work contributes to potential shifts in understanding the ways children learn that, in turn, might influence early childhood education policies, practices and outcomes. This paper, therefore, proposes contemporary principles reflecting current ways to understand and value young children's learning, illustrated through the concept of 'working theories'. A recent construct in scholarship on children's learning, working theories recognize the fluid and changing trajectories of learning that children engage in to understand, and participate more effectively in, their lives. In this way, shifts from traditional views of young children's learning to contemporary and nuanced understandings become possible.

Collaborative and reciprocal teacher-parent partnerships have been established in prior research as vital in empowering ethnic-minority children to be competent learners who value their home background, culture, and language and also learn the language used by teachers as the medium of education. Such collaborative relationships may be challenging to imagine and achieve in countries that have complex political, cultural, social, and economic histories. This paper demonstrates, through a case study in Vietnam, how partnership relationships might be reconceptualised. The research team, comprising both international and local researchers, sought to collectively identify teacher-parent partnership practices that foregrounded local funds of knowledge, and generated a zone of potential development for dialogue about quality practices for teacher-parent partnerships. Through a transformative collaborative workshop process, a tool for aspiring towards quality teacher-parent partnerships was developed. Drawing upon cultural-historical theory, the paper argues that the tool captured the dialectical relations between everyday concepts from practice and academic concepts of quality from the literature (Vygotsky, 1987). These concepts challenged teachers' beliefs and assumptions about families' backgrounds and knowledges, thus enabling teachers to consider more reciprocal relationships and build greater insights into the existing funds of knowledge held by families and communities than previously.